An Invaluable Teaching Experience in Taiwan

Echoes of laughter, yelling, and heavy footsteps grow louder and louder as I approach the classroom. Taking a deep breath, I glance quickly at my lesson plans one last time and push open the door. As I step slowly into the room, I can feel the sudden stares of thirteen pairs of young eyes. Though many students are still out of their seats, with their arms playfully wrapped around each other and toys in their hands, the once raucous classroom immediately begins to quiet down. In the midst of all this, I ponder what to do next.

As another July passes by, I look back to the summer after my first year of college when I taught English to underprivileged elementary school children in rural southern Taiwan. Every day for two weeks, my teaching partner and I created a new lesson plan in which we incorporated activities we found most effective for teaching children. The experience was challenging at first because of the all-new environment and our language barrier. Our students’ knowledge of English was very limited, and my Mandarin speaking skills weren’t at a confident level.

Before arriving in Taiwan, I thought teaching English would be very simple because it is my native language. After a few hours into the first day of class, however, I discovered that was not the case at all. Since I taught fourth to sixth grade students, their levels of English were all scattered. Some of them were not yet familiar with the alphabet while a lot of the older students already knew quite a few vocabulary words. Even so, my teaching partner and I tried our best to create a rewarding learning atmosphere. Whenever we saw our students getting bored with a certain activity, we would quickly try to come up with a new learning strategy. Whenever we noticed someone struggling to learn, we would take the initiative to get to know the student and find out the best way for him or her to grasp knowledge. We would experiment with different teaching methods, including games, songs, and dances, to help each individual learn while having fun. Prizes were a very effective way of getting students to participate in discussions and behave during class, as they were always excited to see what we had brought from America.

Something interesting I noticed at the school was how students there have such close relationships with their teachers. When I was teaching at the elementary school, I would stay after school every day and spend time with my students and a local teacher. This teacher would play basketball with the students for hours after English classes, listen to everything they had to say and take care of them as if they were his children. To his students, he was a friend, father, and teacher all in one.

That experience in Taiwan was definitely one of my best summer memories, and it sparked an interest in teaching. If there’s something I definitely would like to do in the future, it would be to visit my students again.

Laowai Comics: What Happens When VPN Expires

Meet the Great Fire Wall.

This week from our friend, Laowai Comics. Keep it crazy!

Laowai Comics: The “English Corner”

Welcome to our “English Corner”.

This week from our friend, Laowai Comics. Keep in crazy!

Laowai Comics: When Laowai Speaks Chinese

Often ignored.

This week from our friend, Laowai Comics. Only in China – keep it crazy.

Laowai Comics: We Know That Guy

This week from our friend, Laowai Comics. Only in China – keep it crazy.

Buddha, the “Way”, and Christ: The Clash of Religions or Muddling of Beliefs?

In China’s long history, religious views have been a traditional mix of Buddhism (the religion imported from India), Taoism (a school of religious and philosophical ideas started by the sage Lao Zi), and Confucianism (the ethical and sociopolitical teaching originating from the prestigious scholar Confucius).

As early as the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), the emperor Wu managed to combine the three ideas into one ruling doctrine: the Unification of Three Religions (三教合一). People were trained in this ruling doctrine both in academic teachings and through their daily life; inevitably, this belief system led to conflicts due to the three different sources it absorbed.

In the 2,000 years after the Han Dynasty, Chinese people, shaped by their hybrid beliefs and frequently encountering new dogmas like Communism and Maoism, prove to be quite capable of embracing and adapting to a highly inclusive and multicultural – yet more or less contradictory – ideology.

Buddhism had a significant amount of influence the lives of the Chinese: a famous Chinese poem “Spring of the South” (江南春绝句) by Du Mu (杜牧) has the lines, The four hundred and eighty temples of the South Dynasty, / How many terraces are in misty cold rains? (南朝四百八十寺，

多少楼台烟雨中). Confucianism, as well, has an indisputable impact in Chinese moral standards: modern codes governing the behaviors of a country, society, and person were developed from Confucian classics. Both Buddhism and Taoism are compatible with Confucianism, a benign worldview with a focus on harmony and uniformity.

From the late 19th- to the early 20th-century, Protestant missionaries entered China through rampant Western colonial activities in the country’s northern coast. They built churches and set up relief charities and schools for children to disperse the gospel of Christianity. Many Chinese village women were converted and trained by missionaries so they could help to preach the new religion in their own dialects. These Chinese women, called “Bible women” by country people, walked on their tiny bound feet into villages and spread the ideas to other peasants. Thus, in such backward conditions, Protestantism grew vigorously among Chinese villages, especially on the southeast coast of China. The multi-rooted Chinese beliefs system became even more complex.

Protestantism seems a little “foreign”, but it’s not unpopular because it represents, to many, the “advanced” Western civilization. Blame it on cultural imperialism: in my childhood, I perceived Christian spiritual leaders only as fair-skinned, golden-haired, and elegant images that I gleaned from watching and reading Western media. In comparison, with Buddhism, one often sees the scenarios of elderly women, some of them illiterate, kneeling before a golden Buddha statue and murmuring prayers with incense.

So how do other Chinese actually deal with these varied and often contradictory ideas?

From my observation, their behavior tends to be ambivalent. For example, unlike those who are born into Muslim families, whose family lineage and traditions tend to determine their religious beliefs for life, many Han people have had too many choices. (Or, sometimes, during the years of the Cultural Revolution, deadly choices.) While the ruling Communist Party is atheist, it allows the presence of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism in the country.

My aunt was a Buddhist from her youth to her forties, probably because her mother has been a pious Buddhist for over fifty years; yet, both of them believe in fengshui (风水), the philosophical Taoist concept. While my grandmother conducts Buddhist rituals, she also believes in ghosts and deities. A few years ago, a friend of my aunt persuaded her to convert to Christianity. They went to a local church together, and my aunt started to read the Bible; she still holds a belief in Taoist fengshui and still keeps a jade ornament of the Buddha. In her case and others, it seems perfectly natural for modern Chinese to have all of these religions present in their lives.

In my opinion, Chinese individuals are culturally acceptable to foreign religions, though it might take a long time to convince them in a new belief. Over time, Protestant idea was localized and absorbed by domestic cultures into China. Whether it – or something else – becomes a more compatible part of the Chinese beliefs system, remains to be seen.

The Chinese New Year Dilemma

With the advent of the Chinese New Year – China’s most important cultural holiday – controversial issues like pollution, environmental responsibility and the role of traditions are once again brought to light.

It’s no secret that smog levels in Beijing have been continuously reaching unprecedented levels, engulfing the city in toxic chemicals for days at a time. On the measurement scale, air quality levels in the past year have frequently fluctuated between levels going beyond the upper limits of the index and “hazardous” levels. Just last Wednesday, pollution soared to 26 times the safe level recommended by the World Health Organization.

The issue of air pollution is one of the focuses of the Xi administration. The government has worked to address this issue during the past year, offering economic incentives for cutting emissions and instituting fines and penalties for exceeding caps. Additionally, Chinese officials ordered highway closures to both minimize carbon dioxide emissions and prevent traffic accidents, as visibility in Beijing dropped to a mere 500 meters.

Beijing in November 2013

(Photo: Reuters)

Aside from the obvious respiratory and health problems caused by air pollution, there are also numerous negative economic effects associated with the closure of major highways and factories, prohibition of the use of government and private vehicles, and the cancellation of certain outdoor activities, all of which disturb the regular rhythm of the city. Pollution also serves as a major deterrent for tourism.

With the Lunar New Year coming up on January 31st, Chinese officials are extra cautious about air pollution levels. Deriving from ancient mythologies, fireworks and firecrackers continue to be treasured by Chinese citizens as deeply traditional aspects of the holiday, with celebrants setting off the explosives at midnight on the first and fifth days of the lunar calendar to bring good fortune. Unfortunately, they also bring smoke, dust, sulphur-coal compounds and toxic chemicals, which consistently produce spikes in air pollution levels. Last year, PM 2.5 levels jumped by over 500% following the midnight celebrations.

All of this has led Chinese officials to consider banning fireworks on Chinese New Year in relevance to smog concerns, as part of the Beijing mayor’s “all-out effort” against air pollution. Xinhua News reported that the ban will be implemented if pollution reaches the severe “red” or “orange” levels. As such, overall firework cartons are reduced by 10%.

For the good of the environment, perhaps we’ll have to resort to videos of fireworks, as some watch videos of merrily crackling logs in a fireplace?

(New Year’s in Hong Kong)

However, people have been frequently dismissive of past bans, lighting up firecrackers in spite of official recommendations. The long-held custom is not easily or lightly abandoned, as demonstrated in an online poll by China Youth Daily, which reports that only 983 of their 2,529 respondents will refrain from lighting firecrackers – a mere 38%. While modern Chinese governments frequently choose “progress” over traditions, this is a sentiment that does not seem reflective of many Chinese citizens.

As a compromise between cultural preservation and environmental responsibility, Beijing will provide “environmentally friendly fireworks”, which contain no sulfur and produce less smoke. However, the higher price tag may deter people from opting for the greener option. As the holiday approaches, Chinese residents will be facing a choice between setting off the fireworks or not, though it seems many have already made up their mind.

Two Weeks in Kinmen, Taiwan

The summer before college, I traveled to Taiwan to teach English to children in rural areas. While this was partly (okay, mostly) an excuse to return to the amazing country of Taiwan after nearly 6 years, I was also excited to learn that I would be teaching on Kinmen (金門, literally “golden gate”), a small island situated between Taiwan and southern China.

There is no way I can name everything I loved about my experience on Kinmen: the celebrity-esque airstairs we descended after landing amidst heavy tropical winds; our tiny, blessedly air-conditioned sleeping quarters where we hid from the suffocating humid heat that evaded every corner of the island; the famous Taiwanese oyster omelet dish (蚵仔煎) concocted with freshly caught oysters – even the dreaded squat toilets, the occasional frog chilling in the bathrooms, the hairy spiders as big as my hand, and the broken drying machine that forced us to air-dry our laundry and thus wear smelly teaching uniforms.

Rainy, windy, and so wickedly humid my camera fogged up!

However, what was most memorable to me was the quiet history that lurked behind every piece of rubble, every blade of grass, and every drop of summer typhoon rain that landed on Kinmen. In my eyes, Kinmen was like a bubbling cauldron of time, history, and culture. Although initially a relatively tranquil area, Kinmen was transformed into a military base by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949 during the Chinese civil war.

Even after the war, it was used largely for military purposes. In fact, my dad was stationed on Kinmen during his military service. Even today, one can see uniformed men roaming the streets, hauntingly silent military brothel-turned-museums, coastal artillery guns on full display, and abandoned houses riddled with gaping bullet holes.

And the streets! Peering down a single dusty, rustic street, I would see the typical Taiwanese convenience stores; modest, family-owned pawn shops filled with miscellanea; a desolate Shiseido boutique, and a classy, renovated Italian restaurant – lined up all in a row, like a strangely mismatched, yet charmingly fitting, Kinmen outfit.

A typical Kinmen street

On these streets, I watched a funeral procession march, belting out festive music and clad in white mourning clothes. To these streets, I snuck out with some friends past curfew to hop over our dorm’s brick wall and satisfy our midnight snack cravings at the 24/7 Family Mart. Through these streets, I biked in the daylight and in the darkness, daringly removing both hands from the handle bars and feeling the cool sea breeze ripple through my hair. From these streets, we drove our rickety, coughing van to the ocean’s rocky shore and gazed into the foggy horizon in amazement as the cityscape of Xiamen, China, loomed right before our eyes.

To me, Kinmen is a timeless and special place, riddled with intricate history and cultural mishmash. Although I only spent two weeks there, I hold dear all those precious memories and experiences, from the comfortably expected to the mind-blowing moments of culture shock. There is no doubt about it – one day, I will return.

All photos courtesy of the author.